


Half-sick of Shadows

by osprey_archer



Category: Shadow Unit
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-27 23:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daphne visits Hafidha in Idlewood. <i>“I always thought the Lady of Shalott got a raw deal,” Daphne says, approaching Hafidha’s cage. “Dying for love of Lancelot. Couldn’t she have left her tower and walked </i>away<i> from Camelot?”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Half-sick of Shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [minnaleigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minnaleigh/gifts).



The Bug is restless today. Daphne can see it in Hafidha’s jerky movements as she paces her burrow, in her tense shoulders, in the narrowing of her eyes as she watches Daphne divest herself of all traces of metal.

“To what do I owe this honor?” Hafidha demands.

“I come every week,” Daphne reminds her. It’s hard to keep her voice just right: calm, but not too gentle. Hafidha hates being treated like glass.

“I didn’t mean the visit,” Hafidha says. “I mean _that_.” She nods at the paper bag clenched in Daphne’s left hand. “You haven’t put it down. What’s so special about it? Is it a bomb?”

Daphne shifts the bag to her right hand and picks at her wristwatch. “Christmas cookies,” she said. “I made them.”

“ _You_ baked them? Did El Generalissimo ask you to kill me?” says Hafidha.

“You don’t have to eat any,” Daphne says, and despite herself she sounds tired. The Bug has been winning for her last three visits.

Hafidha’s face tenses for a moment, then relaxes. “No, bring it on,” she says. “At least food poisoning will add some variety to the soul-crushing monotony of my days.”

Daphne’s wedding ring rattles on the plastic tray. “Glad to be of service,” she says.

Hafidha is pacing again. “‘I am half-sick of shadows! said the Lady of Shalott.’ At least she got to keep her embroidery silks. I’m surprised she didn’t use them to hang herself.”

Daphne has to bite her tongue. The Bug will just lap up the misery if she lets Hafidha draw her into a discussion about death, and suicide, and pain. “I always thought the Lady of Shalott got a raw deal,” Daphne says instead, approaching Hafidha’s cage. “Dying for love of Lancelot. Couldn’t she have left her tower and walked _away_ from Camelot?”

“At least she got to go outside in the end. Even if it killed her,” says Hafidha. “At least she could _look_ outside.”

There’s nothing to say to that, either. Hafidha wraps her arms around herself, looking small in her bright bulky sweater.

Velasquez wands Daphne one last time to check for metal. No beeps.

Daphne steps up to the airlock. “May I come in?”

“Said the spider to the fly. No, that’s backwards, isn’t it? – said the fly to the spider.”

It’s not a good sign when Hafidha’s conversation tumbles all over itself like this. “Hafs – ”

“Walk into my parlor,” Hafs says, giving her a grand curtsey.

The airlock hisses closed behind Daphne. She sits in the straight-backed chair by Hafidha’s table. Hafidha flings herself down in her rocker, halfway across the room. Her fingers tense, claw-like, over the chair arms. “But if you think about it,” she says, “I am the fly. I walked into the parlor, and you spiders never let me out again.”

A silence falls between them. Hafidha rocks, frowning down at her lap. Daphne sets her paper bag on the table. It crackles. “Velasquez says you’ve been rewatching the _Lord of the Rings_ movies – ” she begins, but Hafidha cuts her off.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Hafidha says, standing abruptly. “Going outside.” She scrapes her chair across the floor to the table, and snags from somewhere a piece of thick soft paper and a purple crayon. “A Faraday helmet,” she says, and swiftly sketches a tall thin woman, head wrapped in a bubble of mesh. “Do you think it would work?”

“I don’t think that would be secure,” says Daphne.

Hafidha loops a big circle around the figure she’s drawn. “A Faraday hamster ball, then,” she says, cross-hatching it in violent purple strokes. The purple crayon suddenly snaps in half. Hafidha hurls it at the table. “Pity I’m not Harold. Did you read that book? _Harold and the Purple Crayon_?”

“My mom read it to me. I used to pretend – ”

“Now _that_ would be a mythology. I would draw a door,” Hafidha says. “Or a noose. Or at least a window. Do you think Harold was a gamma?”

Hafidha likes to play spot-the-anomaloid with fictional characters (the way Daphne plays spot-the-bisexual, sometimes). But right now she sounds dead serious, like Harold is a real person and might even know be sketching mayhem across the United States.

“Or he might be a beta,” Hafidha continues. “Does El Jefe still think that distinction is valid? I bet you’re all just _waiting_ for Platypus to turn on you. Or maybe not. _I_ might crack, but not the golden boy, oh no. And he promised me – ” She clenches her fingers around the broken crayon. They keep her nails short so she can’t draw blood when she does that.

“They won’t let me have anything sharp to write with,” she bursts out. “No pens, no pencils, nothing sharp, or I might stab myself through the eye, and then you would all have to be _happy_.”

“Hafs.”

Hafidha’s face twists. She presses a hand to her mouth, but the words burst out anyway. “I should have died in May,” she snaps. “The old Hafidha died in May, and this is, this is just a husk, like a person with dementia, who can’t do anything but drool and is a burden on everyone and when I die, you’ll all be so relieved because finally you can get on with – ”

“Wabbit!” says Daphne. “ _Stop._ ”

Hafidha twists the broken crayon until it breaks again. She looks down at the broken pieces in surprise, and drops them to the floor. One rolls against Daphne’s loafer.

Hafidha can’t look at Daphne, but twists her head to press her face to her sweater. “What about the cookies, then?” she asks, voice muffled.

Daphne opens the white paper bag. The scent of vanilla billows out, and Daphne is gratified to see Hafidha’s nostrils flare and her throat bob as she swallows.

“Sugar cookies,” says Daphne. “I baked. Tricia supervised.” A grin tugs her mouth. “There were supposed to be six dozen. But we started throwing the dough at each other, so…” She shrugs. “We wasted a bunch of it.”

Hafidha withdraws a star cookie from the bag. “That’s probably the best thing to do with anything you cook,” she says, holding the cookie between the tips of two fingers. “Why’d you bother baking the rest of it?”

It pricks, more than it should, because Daphne had thought they had shut the Bug up, finally. She lets the pain wash through her. If she tries to push it back it will only hurt more, and make the Bug giddy and frantic with glee. “Try them before you knock them,” she says, and takes a bite. The taste of almonds and vanilla floods her mouth. She closes her eyes for a moment and chews, slowly. “It’s my mother’s recipe.”

Her mother always used real vanilla beans, long and black and shriveled. One year Daphne’s brother told her that the beans were witches’ fingers, and Daphne refused to eat any cookies till her mother assured her that witches’ fingers grew back. You just had to ask for them.

She opens her eyes. Hafidha is looking at her, fingers clenched so tightly around each other that Daphne can see her knuckles pressed against her skin. “You shouldn’t talk about that in front of the Bug,” says Hafidha.

“To hell with the Bug,” says Daphne. “I won’t tell it if you won’t.”

Hafidha gapes at her, and all of a sudden starts laughing, and they giggle like schoolgirls playing hooky for the first time. “It doesn’t work like that,” Hafidha says, when her giggles have subsided into gasps.

“I know,” said Daphne. “Have a cookie.”

Hafidha takes a Christmas tree cookie from the bag. She tugs off one of its branches. Her fingers tremble. She takes a bite, and says, “It’s good.”

“Thanks,” says Daphne, and finds herself grinning. “Not that I needed you to tell me. They’ve already been officially praised.”

“Chaz?”

“One better. El Jefe.”

Daphne draws an orange from her coat pocket. She pierces it with her thumbnail, and the scent of citrus drives the shadows from their shoulders.

“So I’ve been watching the _Lord of the Rings_ ,” says Hafidha, leaning back in her rocker and gesturing with a snowflake cookie. “And Gollum? Definitely gamma material. Have you considered evil rings as a possible Anomaly transmission device?”

“I don’t think it’s high on our list,” Daphne says, and widens her eyes. “Maybe that’s why we haven’t figured it out!”

“And you know who else is a possible beta?” says Hafidha, leaning forward. “Captain Jack Sparrow. Skinny, crazy, weirdly lucky.”

“But that would make Duke a beta,” Daphne objects.

“Well, exactly. You just _know_ Johnny Depp is going to play Duke in the movie when all this goes public. He's the straight white guy, they'll make him the hero.”

And they go on like that, bouncing movies back and forth and eating cookies. Hafidha sprays crumbs when she laughs, and Daphne relaxes into her seat and peels every last bit of pith off her orange, like Faulkner does.

She’s halfway through actually eating the orange when Hafidha suddenly sits up straight. “I think you should go,” she says tensely.

Daphne is startled. “Hafs?”

Hafs has clenched her arms around herself again. “It’s been a good visit. You should leave while it’s still – ”

Right. Daphne stands. “I’ll see you next week.”

“Don’t you have Christmas plans?”

“Sure,” says Daphne. She touches Hafs’ hand. “I’m coming to Idlewood.”

Hafidha’s hand shakes. She flicks it: _go_.

Daphne leaves the half-finished orange and the paper bag on Hafidha’s table. The airlock hissed open for her, and she thinks she hears Hafidha hiss behind her, but when she looks back through the copper mesh Hafidha is still sitting hunched and tense in her rocker.

“Merry Christmas, Hafs,” Daphne whispers. She presses a palm against the cold copper mesh of the Faraday cage, and softly walks out.


End file.
